Goodbye New Years, hello stars

Time?  It’s dark.

I woke to the clanking of glasses thinking we had already arrived.  Barely three hours in.  On a plane it’s never like that.

What does it matter, 9:05 a.m. in farthest northern Siberia?

We had just passed over the Bering Sea, first far north of Alaska, then far north of Russia, over the Chukchi Sea.  The darkness below as thick and sonorous as a turtle’s eye, brown like a night in the forest; mystical glaciatic islands protruded from the dark, too far below the plane, too massive and frozen in time to be passable.  It took me several minutes to realize that they were shadows from the engines on the wing.  And above the wing – this was winter in Siberia, hear? – a long, dim light.  There was nothing else it could be; it was stratified like rays bursting from the earth, from the arctic ice, I assume.  My first sighting of the Northern Lights.

*

Perhaps they grow more subdued the closer you get to their source.  These weren’t shifty, nor wildly painted in the air.  They stood still, their only color a dim non-blackness, the throbbing heart of ice.  Perhaps further north you encounter the older, wiser lights that better comprehend their cause.

I think it is 9:20 p.m. here, actually.  So utterly black now, the sea past, only tundric unreflective forests below so that you cannot even see the wing.

*

We were over the northernmost island of Japan, which I understand is pretty sparsely populated, and I saw two tiny outcroppings of light.  They reminded me of the necklace of little Mexican towns I saw flying back from Chile.  But it was all different – the sky was different, an entirely new outcropping of stars and all that black, strange sky between me and my love, as far as we can physically be from one another, right now.  I imagined the secret green glens, the frosted leaves of Asian trees, the little creeks that children have known all their lives and waded through to their knees.  And Vladivostok across the water, entirely different – the shipping crates, the cranes, the miles of wire and workshops and storage and those two inexplicable lights out in the middle of the water – perhaps some sailors, and what are they doing?  There is too much to know; more to guess.

*

Every guilt you’ve ever felt revisits you on a 14-hour plane ride, all in the nighttime, all with no sleep.  Fears, not so much.  The future is quite far away.  You just pass through the thin atmosphere far above your mind.  You the blind surveyor.